Dr. Know: Stumped on Bumbershoots

Do Portlanders really eschew umbrellas?

There is the notion here that real Portlanders do not
use umbrellas. Really? We’re stupid enough or silly enough to get
drenched in a downpour?

—Kevin S.

What is a “real Portlander,” anyway? I thought all the real
Portlanders moved away in 1995 to escape the Californians. (Luckily,
they left behind plenty of lumberjack clothes to keep the hipsters warm
on their collective daily trek from the Prius to the Stumptown counter.)

More
saliently—what downpour? Not to go all old-man on you (he said, lying),
but in my Illinois youth we had real rain. I’m pretty sure I walked 20
miles to school each day through chest-deep flash floods, naked, with
rabid crayfish dangling by their claws from my nut sack. (And I was
glad!)

That’s the kind of rain you need an umbrella for. In Portland, we don’t use umbrellas because…it doesn’t rain that much here.

Now, now; put away those pitchforks. Sure, it rains often, and it rains for a long time. It just doesn’t rain that much. Portland isn’t even in the top 15 major U.S. cities in annual rainfall.

We are No. 1 in rainy
(as distinct from snowy) days, with around 165 per year—we even beat
Seattle! But due to the fact that our precipitation is not so much rain
as an extremely dickish form of fog, you never get the kind of
wring-out-your-briefs wet that makes you shake your tiny fist at the sky
and vow, “Never again.”

Add to that the fact
that if you did carry an umbrella, you’d have to carry it all the time,
and you can see why for most Portlanders it hardly seems worth the
trouble.

All of this does
nothing to mitigate the soul-crushing, Kafkaesque oppressiveness of five
straight months without sun, of course, but an umbrella won’t help with
that. Might I recommend a flask?